The cascade of transformative events, technical progress, ideological and religious upheavals (everything went together), and intellectual and cultural developments that occurred between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in what is commonly considered the full bloom of the humanist Renaissance and the official birth of the modern world, was unprecedented and prodigious. The aesthetic and intellectual recovery of the updated Greco-Roman classical world, the expansion of knowledge in medicine and astronomy, the broadening of scope in geographical and commercial terms (with the European discovery of the New World), the crucial pictorial invention of perspective, the shattering of Christianity caused by the reformer Martin Luther: all of this, while in many cases not representing a break with the Middle Ages but rather a continuation and culmination of medieval dynamics, ways of doing things, and ideas, makes that era a singularly radiant moment in human history.

All of Patrick Modiano's books are cut from the same cloth. The pretext is always a search. The character tasked with carrying it out – generally a solitary one, the narrator – uses elements from an era, let's say, analog (address books, notebooks, maps, old paper photographs). The action – and the reflection that follows – usually takes place in Paris and its environs. And the time of the story, after the Second World War, a conflict that, more or less, has had some repercussions on the characters. The great theme of his novels is memory. A search for a lost time, perhaps?

When you start reading any narrative by Gustave Flaubert, it's inevitable to think of Madame Bovary. The reasons are obvious: this prodigious novel, a founder of modern literature, is the compendium of all the wisdom of the realist novel, and I assure you that it is a great deal of wisdom. Implicit in it, moreover, is the entire cinematograph, which would use and abuse Flaubert's techniques: the parallel montage of the conversation between Emma and Rodolphe at the agricultural fair, the enigmatic itinerary of the fiacre through Rouen (the same Rouen as Claude Monet) with Emma and Léon inside as the mystery of seduction is reawakened (which makes me think, incidentally, of the scene in James Cameron's Titanic, when Jack and Rose make love for the first time in a car), or Emma's visit to the tax collector with the aim of avoiding seizure, observed through the point of view of two neighbors.Everything in this marvelous novel, in effect, foreshadowed cinema. But if in anything Flaubert proves himself a master, it is in the rhythm of narration, with the perfect management of summaries, ellipses, and amplifications. It is curious because, years ago, Quim Monzó introduced, as a preliminary quotation for a volume of his stories (Guadalajara), the following quotation from the Flaubertian masterpiece: "They began slowly, then they went faster" (ch. 8 of the first part). As I read in an interview, it seems Monzó wanted to mock the custom of "preliminary quotations." But the fact is that, whether he wanted to or not, he chose a sentence (from the ballroom scene at the Marquis d'Audervilliers' house) that could be understood as a summary of Flaubert's attitude towards narration, which is nothing more than knowing when to summarize and when to make moments last. In fact, on one occasion when Emma walks with Léon, the narrator repeats the same sentence structure: "For a time she walked quickly; then she slowed her pace" (ch. 3 of the second part). Perhaps Monzó wanted to mock it, but he surely understood very well the invaluable narrative lesson it implied.With all this in our baggage, undertaking now the reading of the Three Tales that Georgina Solà has magnificently translated for the Flâneur publishing house is to reconnect with the immortal style of the also author of Sentimental Education. Because there is no need to look for plots, nor to confuse oneself with the genealogy of the characters. The authentic protagonist of everything Flaubert writes is his style.A description, for example, of Julià's wife, the hero of the second story: “She was very pale, a little proud, and intelligent. The horns of her coif brushed the door lintels; the tail of her woolen dress dragged three paces behind her. Her house was run like the inside of a monastery; every morning she distributed the work to the maids, checked the jams and ointments, and spun or embroidered altar cloths. By dint of praying, a son came to her”.“A force of praying a son came to him”. Only the sagacity of a born storyteller is capable of condensing irony, time, and syntax into just nine words. This is Flaubert, without a shadow of a doubt.Of the three stories in the collection, the first, A Simple Heart, is the one that most resembles the world of Madame Bovary. It is the France after the Napoleonic dream, the arrière-pays populated by petty bourgeoisie, widows, maids, and rectors. In this provincial universe, the characters dream, save or squander, and struggle to survive without ever cheapening their dream. Like Emma Bovary.

A group of five adolescent friends living in a housing development in a small French provincial town decides to enter an abandoned house: the experience will be the starting point of a nightmare that will change their lives. This is the premise that floats on the surface of the plot of La nit devastada, the first novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) that we can read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Oriol Vaqué for Proa. Behind this horror premise lie family conflicts, abuse, and disappointments, but also the discovery of desire and the strength of friendship. After establishing himself before the age of 30 thanks to Una educación libertina (2008) and La sal (2010), both in Spanish published by Cabaret Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo once again focuses on the chiaroscuro of intimacy and social inequalities through a powerful story that pays homage to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven with a powerful, rich, and sensory literary style.

The passage of time has not diminished the shyness of Jean Echenoz, but it has not managed to turn him into a cynical or disenchanted author. Born in Orange in 1947, the French writer has been one of the headliners of this year's Mot festival, but before that he passed through Barcelona with a new book in hand. Bristol (Raig Verd, 2026; translation by Anna Casassas) narrates decisive months in the life of Robert Bristol, a film director who is finishing the shoot of his latest film. It features effervescent, established, and semi-retired actresses, a solicitous but inconstant lover, an inspired policeman, a blackmailing general from South Africa, a bestselling author living in a palace, and a long list of supporting characters, human and animal, who further expand Echenoz's universe. The usual taste for details, the author's undeniable skill, and a sense of humor more subtle than our times make Bristol a pleasant and recommendable reading experience.

The death of the mother of French writer Emmanuel Carrère It had to culminate in a book. The inevitable recollection of the past that accompanies the death of a parent was the lever that propelled him, once he had digested the highly sensitive material, to write the mixture of chronicle and family autobiography that is KolkhozA book full of surprising relatives—Carrère has a cousin who is the president of Georgia!—and in which he himself would be like a kind of first cousin ofA Russian novel and of Limonov, two of the peaks of Carrère's work. With a translation by Ferran Ràfols Gesa that sounds wonderful, Kolkhoz It revisits Russian themes and even brings back some of the characters from those books, but it plays on different ground, that of family history linked to the history of the 20th century: can the description of a private room tell of a historical shift? In the land of Georges Duby, the answer is "of course," and Carrère proves it beyond a doubt.

Jezebela novel that Irène Némirovsky (kyiv, 1903-Auschwitz, 1942), published in 1936, begins with the trial of an older, "extremely wealthy" and pretentious woman, Gladys Eysenach, accused of murdering her lover of twenty years. Throughout the first chapter, which essentially serves as a prologue, we witness the reconstruction of the crime scene through the interrogation of the accused and a large gallery of witnesses. Written almost like a Hollywood screenplay—with sharp, snappy dialogue, secrets revealed, worldliness, mystery, and drama—this prologue unfolds before the reader all the ingredients of what appears to be a passionate melodrama. We discover, because she herself has confessed, that the wealthy, elegant, and cosmopolitan Eysenach did indeed commit the crime. And we believe we also know her motivations: jealousy, spite, and mad love. However, after the prologue, the novel flashes back and proceeds to reconstruct the protagonist's life from her earliest youth. What we end up discovering is far worse than we imagined.

We know Vanessa Springora on the impact of her first book, Consent (published in French in 2020 and in Catalan in 2021). The volume narrates her seduction by the writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was a teenager. She was in love, her mother consented to the relationship (hence the title), and he was a known pedophilia propagandist. In the absence of her father, living with her estranged mother, Springora fell prey to a collector of young girls—and young boys—who didn't hesitate to turn many of her literary works into apologetics for pedophilia.

Emmanuel Bove (1894-1945) was originally named Emmanuel Bobovnikoff and was the son of a Russian-Jewish father and a Luxembourgish maid. He lived a hectic life, between cheap boarding houses and shabby hotels, lung disease, and financial hardship. In 1924, the writer Colette published his first book, which is now available in Catalan thanks to a brilliant translation by Josep Alemany. My friends It is a perfect example of Bove's talent, a "secret" writer, highly recommended among writers, who has not made much fortune below the Pyrenees. Patrick Modiano, although Bove lacks the fog that surrounds the French Nobel Prize winner's characters, but rather the melancholy and sadness in the background. Everything is cleaner and clearer, rawer and more concise: "Before each customer there was a bottle and a glass. Music could have been made with a knife."